Well since I last posted the weather in the UK has been challenging, lots of grey sky and occasional rain, with odd spells of fine weather. Then the last week of September has been glorious. Quite a lot of time has been taken up getting photos for the new BMC Cheshire Sandstone guidebook, and I think these are now largely complete. Publication is due in the spring.

I’ve also been seizing whatever spells of fine weather present themselves and getting some landscape work done, some for the National Trust and some for myself.And doing bits of climbing and walking, trying to keep fit. And fitted in a quick trip to East Anglia

Must update the galleries when I get a minute!

Spent a satisfying day yesterday at Hoghton Quarry near Preston. Access for climbing has been very problematic in the past, but is now improving. Due to the problematic access, the routes have become very overgrown and dirty; volunteers have now been putting in huge amounts of effort cleaning them. My main task was getting photos of climbers on the cleaned routes to publicise the good work done.

As part of the cleaning activities, we identified a large loose block at the top of the route “Mandarin”, which we decided had to be removed. This is the point at which the block pivoted out into space…

Large dangerous block removed from the route "Mandarin" at Hoghton Quarry.

Why my own website? A lot of my climbing and hillwalking images has been on UKC (UK Climbers forum) since around 2004, but I was building up larger and larger volumes of non-climbing related work, which I didn’t have anywhere to display on line.

Also, with no longer working full time, I’m starting to do some commissioned work, so it’s useful to have an online gallery of my own I can point prospective clients at. I briefly tried using Flickr, but didn’t really get on with that. So here we are…

Why do I enjoy photography? The world can be an amazingly beautiful place, and I enjoy the challenge of trying to be in the right place at the right time to capture at least some of it.

I’m well aware I have a lot of learning to do, so feedback and constructive input is welcome.

Thanks for visiting

Paul